Nature: The Legacy of Wordsworth

[Dominic Carlone has kindly shared Snatched Away in Beauty's Bloom, his elegantly designed Hallam site at the University of Windsor (from which this document comes), with readers of the the Victorian Web.]

From Wordsworth, Hallam learned how to expertly recreate
nature in all its majesty. Hallam embodies the pleasures of nature
in a number of gorgeous lyrics, always with a calm reflection of
tone befitting the tranquil meditations of his great predecessor.
Wordsworth's influence is strongly felt in lines such as these:

The garden trees are busy with the shower
That fell ere sunset; now methinks they talk,
Lowly and sweetly as befits the hour,
One to another down the grassy walk. [Complete text]

In his most shining moments, Hallam can rival Wordsworth, Keats,
or any poet in his ability to transport the reader to a scene of
splendid natural lushness, as we see in the following lines:

I lay within a little bowered nook,
With all green leaves, nothing but green around me,
And through their delicate comminglings flashed
The broken light of a sunned waterfall
Ah, water of such freshness, that it was
A marvel and an envy! [Complete text]

Although his poems are not fully developed, passages such as this,
from "Meditative Fragments, IV"demonstrate a keen ability to
give nature "a certain colouring of the imagination"whereby
ordinary things are presented to the mind in an unusual way
(Wordsworth, 143).

Hallam's nature poetry owes much to Wordsworth. However,
as the sonnet quoted above demonstrates, Hallam could use the
Wordsworthian idiom to create fresh and unique conceits of his
own. Furthermore, the extreme sensuality of the second quotation
foretells the extravagant natural landscapes of Tennyson. Hallam
was still under the spell of Wordsworth and the Romantics when
he died, but he was well on the way to mastering the Romantic
idiom and forging a style of his own.